Hip Hop Family Tree Book 1

Starred review from December 2, 2013
Originating as a webcomic serialized at Boing Boing, this oversize volume is an epic, exhaustive chronicle of the most culturally impactful popular music movement of the past four decades. With its roots embedded in the streets of 1970s New York City, hip-hop and rap slowly germinated as a DIY urban party phenomenon, weaving a powerful funky spell among the Big Apple’s people of color. Local deejays and rappers were catapulted into the scene’s spotlight overnight, and the battles for performance supremacy honed the skills of the form’s progenitors at parties and clubs, which soon led the sounds they created to be recorded and distributed on bootleg vinyl. As the movement grew, so too did its visibility, and the rest is international pop-culture history. The strip’s visual tone bears a borderline underground aesthetic that perfectly suits the material—brown-edged paper and antique flat color—with a semi-cartoony feel, reminiscent of the graffiti that helped define the graphic aspect of the movement. It’s a massive undertaking, but Piskor succeeds mightily in chronicling hip-hop’s formative years with riveting detail.

Starred review from November 15, 2013

Piskor's obsession with the cultural history of hip-hop combined with his mastery of facial detail honors the dozens of artists and supporting players who populated New York's streets, clubs, and recording studios in the early 1970s and 80s. Hip-hop neophytes may find the relationships among the huge cast confusing, yet Piskor's portrayal of a "history-through-connections" comes through clearly. To please beat-happy crowds, platter-jockeys playing pop music for parties began mix/mastering the instrumental "breaks." Then emcees superimposed verbal showmanship and rhyming over the instrumentals. These innovations were slow to find backing in the recording industry--even some of the artists experimenting with this work thought its appeal came from live performances only. They were wrong. Here Piskor (Wizzywig) tells the tale in primary-color art reminiscent of 1970s comic books. VERDICT Piskor shows how the vitality of words and art have trumped violence and poverty, even if only sometimes. His gritty chronicle will spark debate among fans and help orient newcomers to hip-hop's history. Salty language and sex references put this into adult collections.--M.C.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2014
Hip-hop devotee Piskor was one of Harvey Pekar's last collaborators and here shows himself to be Pekar's true disciple as a chronicler of popular culture. In fact, he one-ups his famous partner-mentorPekar, an avid and knowledgeable fan of bebop, never scripted a whole book on his passion. Moreover, Piskor intends this book to be the first of several tracing the history of what is still, 40 years after its emergence, the most important stylistic development in pop music since rock 'n' roll. The large-format volume is strictly a chronicle, presenting the major figures in hip-hop as they appear and make their impressions on the music. It's full of names while barren of explanation, description, analysis, and even, oddly enough, dates (though for fans of hip-hop, that likely won't be a deterrent). Piskor's artwork seems equally indebted to the looks of golden-age DC superhero comics and Pekar's greatest collaborator, R. Crumb. Besides the bibliography, discography, and index expected of a pop-music-history reference work, Piskor provides an appendix-in-comics on his personal understanding of The Hip Hop/Comic Book Connection. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)